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This summer on Worthy Farm, Pilton, there won’t be 175,000 guests. No euphoric dancing in a giant rabbit hole. No moments of wonder at the stone circle at sunrise. No partying with someone who you believe to be Suggs from Madness, until a sobering moment at 6am when you realise, no, this is not Suggs from Madness, this is just a man in a trilby hat.

2018 is the year the cows come home; and it’s a fallow year for Glastonbury festival.

A regular year sees thousands of people working across more than 25 different stages and areas–not to mention the many clubs, theatres, tents and pop-ups housed within these different zones – so what does the summer off mean for them?

Surprisingly – or perhaps not – a well-earned holiday during the final weekend of June is the last thing many of these festival hedonists have got planned.

This month, a documentary will premiere that charts the rise and fall of one of the most influential parts of the festival, following one of the other favourite late-night dance areas on the farm hosting a London weekender. Thanks to the on-going dedication of these Glastonbury stalwarts, it’s still possible to party like you’re in Pilton this year – and even better, there’s not a welly in sight.

Arcadia: ‘Michael Eavis once said to me that the fallow year was the best idea he’d ever had. I agree’

The industrial dance zone Arcadia – famous for its giant mechanical spider, where DJs play in the thorax and revellers dance below them – celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. It’s now a full-time company and it takes the spectacular to cities across the world for the rest of the year from June – most recently Taiwan, Bangkok and Miami.

They’ve never held an event in London, so last weekend, they took the opportunity of not being stuck in the manic world of pre-festival logistics and held a weekend-long event at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

Pip Rush, creative director and one of the Arcadia founders, explains: “Michael Eavis once said to me the fallow year was the best idea he’d ever had and I agree. It’s good for the land, it gives it a bit of a break and socially it’s really good too, it gives everyone a summer to have a breather. I think it’s one of the reasons that’s made Glastonbury so successful after all these years.”

“We realised that festivals and parties definitely aren’t a new idea. It’s part of what brought civilisations together”

Fresh from roaming the globe for new ideas and inspirations, they showcased a centuries-old performance. Rush says: “We’re working with an Aborigine tribe, the Whadjuk Noongar, who resurrected a dance and performance that hadn’t been performed outside of their community since 1901. It’s about a spider that weaves a web to weave tribes together and it was performed around a fire to lots of rhythmical dancing – all the synergies seem to match up.

“We’ve dedicated our lives to doing these big collective experiences and parties and suddenly we found the oldest culture on the planet and we realised that festivals and parties definitely aren’t a new idea. It’s part of what brought civilisations together thousands of years ago.”

Block 9: Gorillaz, Dua Lipa and a creative retreat

Block9’s NYC Downlow at Glastonbury Festival 2017

Gideon Berger and Stephen Gallagher, co-founders of Block9, the turbo-dance, sprawling inner-cityscapes and anything-goes LGBTQ+ space, which includes the hugely popular The NYC Downlow venue, have also found that their time off from Glasto has given them the creative space to explore radically different ideas and projects.

The pair are just back from Palestine, where they previously designed two rooms as part of Banksy’s Walled Off hotel, a living art installation that’s also a fully-functioning hotel, open to the public all year round and built just metres from the wall that cuts off the West Bank from Israel.

Their involvement increased when Berger and Gallagher hosted a creative retreat at the hotel, which brought together musicians like Brian Eno, Roisin Murphy and The Black Madonna alongside Middle Eastern artists Mashrou’ Leila and Akram Abdulfattah to collaborate on tracks. The retreat took place in February this year and three weeks ago, the album Block9 Creative Retreat Palestine was released.

“Not having Glastonbury on this year means there’s definitely a little bit of breathing space for us to focus our creative attentions elsewhere”

Berger says: “We proposed the retreat because as Block9 we are fascinated by the point where music, art and politics collide. It’s our main area of exploration at all our venues at Glastonbury.”

Gallagher adds: “Glasto is normally a really significant part of our year, but the fall-out from one year and the planning of the next means we never really stop working on the festival. Not having Glastonbury on this year means there’s definitely a little bit of breathing space for us to focus our creative attentions elsewhere, the creative retreat is perfect example of that.”

Next up for the Block9 crew is a series of big name remixers for their album, as well as continuing their work as production designers for the Gorillaz live shows and art directing for the BRIT-award winning pop singer, Dua Lipa.

Shangri-La: Decamping to Sonar Festival

Any trip to Glastonbury isn’t complete without a late night trip to the far south-east corner of the festival site where all manner of theatrical and artistic deviance plays out among airplane cockpits, and giant dolls limbs scattered across the fields. For those that make it this far, they discover a literal Shangri-La.

Chris Tofu, programmer of this area, says of their seasonal sabbatical: “We don’t do Shangri-La anywhere else other than Glastonbury, but we take the spirit of Shangri-La out and about with us for the summer.”

For their gang this year, there’s a focus on their “art for everyone” project, Shangri-Lart, that sells limited edition art at inexpensive prices that also supports the artists. As part of this sideline, they’re doing an “enormous” installation at this year’s Sonar Festival in Barcelona, from 14 to 16 June.

Shangri-La use the Glastonbury gap to form bonds and keep connections with other like-minded people, as they are also involved in Fusion festival in Germany and Revolution in Romania. “We believe a million per cent in collaborations – it’s an essential thing for us,” Tofu explains. “We’re all part of a long line of DNA that links us with so many other people and festivals.”

Silver Hayes: Love festivals and a wedding

Fatboy Slim will headline Love Saves the Day Festival in Bristol in June

Over to Silver Hayes, the festival’s go-to dancefloor destination. Part of the collective will continue the good vibes in their Love-brand festivals: Love Saves The Day in Bristol on 26 and 27 May, and Love International in Croatia, 27 June to 4 July – which has sold out for the first time this year, presumably in part due to there being no Glastonbury. The boss for their Glasto area, Malcolm Haynes, is currently event co-ordinating Bristol’s St Paul’s Carnival on 7 July.

Dave Harvey – co-programmer for Silver Hayes – says: “We take a lot of inspiration from going to Glastonbury and our site there, what we soak up there we translate a lot of the experience to our other events.

“Normally we finish at Glastonbury on the Monday, then we have to fly out to Croatia on the Tuesday for the start of Love International – so this year it means we won’t be arriving in quite the same state as we do normally. I’m not quite sure how we manage it normally – it’s definitely something of an endurance test, so it works out quite well for us to have the year off.”

It also allows for a bit of personal admin time too – Harvey says that a key member of the Silver Hayes team, Lou Fitzpatrick, will be getting married on what would be Glastonbury weekend.

Lost Vagueness: a new documentary

Many of the most popular areas emanate from the legendary Lost Vagueness section of Glastonbury. This twisted cabaret zone is credited with reviving Glasto from 2000, when creator Roy Gurvitz brought the unique idea of immersive interaction, burlesque and bizarre happenings to the event, and with it, a whole new level of fun.

Film director Sofia Olins followed the tribe of new-age travellers for 12 years to document their how their innovative visions played out and changed the face of the festival scene forever – but also the fall-out that lead to Gurvitz pulling Lost Vagueness from Glastonbury in the late noughties.

Her film, Lost in Vagueness, premieres as part of the Everyman Music Film Festival on 8 May and will later be doing a mini tour around the UK. Olins says: “It will absolutely fill that Glastonbury hole in the calendar in June, because it gives you that history of where it all came from, but also a flavour of what makes it all so much fun and so awesome.”

Three other European festivals to fill the June Glastonbury gap

Isle of Wight festival, 20-24 June
It’s the 50th year of this iconic musical festival and their headliners are Depeche Mode, The Killers and Kasabian. Weekend tickets £209. isleofwightfestival.com

Kala Festival, 20-27 June
It’s a beachside party for the first year of this festival, held in Dhërmi, Albania. Featuring Roy Ayers, Hot Chip, Todd Terje and Moodymann. Tickets including hotels from £195 per person. kala.al

INMusic, 25 -27 June
Croatia’s biggest open-air festival takes place on a lake in the middle of Lake Jarum. Expect epic sets from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, The Kills, Queens of The Stone Age and David Byrne. Three-day tickets from 60 euros. inmusicfestival.com

Glastonbury Festival brings together some of the most talented artists, designers, musicians, performers and event producers in the country, and it appears that creativity never takes the summer off – happily, for die-hard fans of the event.

And despite the producers keeping busy, the official break keeps things fresh and means the crew come back revived and brimming with new ideas and inspirations they want to explore for the following year’s events, further cementing the festival as one of the key points in the UK’s cultural calendar.

In fact, as is the nature of the festival circuit, many of the areas are already in the planning stages for next year. Berger from Block9 says: “There’s a lot of our massive extended family coming our way saying “How am I going to cope without my annual fix of homo-utopia?” But I think it’s good to have a year off as it makes people super excited for the next festival.”

“Glastonbury are going to seriously regret having a year off as it’s given us more time to plot bigger and much more expensive, pain-in-the-arse projects for them to help us deliver”

He adds that he’s already booked the headliner for The NYC Downlow for next year and laughs: “Glastonbury are going to seriously regret having a year off as it’s given us more time to plot bigger and much more expensive, pain-in-the-arse projects for them to help us deliver. So come 2019 you’ll be seeing Block9 on steroids, bigger and better and bolder than you’ve ever seen us before.”

It seems a change is as good as a rest for these festival big-hitters. Which gives us just 13 months to prepare ourselves for the return of one of the greatest weekends of the summer, too.

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